ENGLISH SYNTAX: From Word to Discourse
Lynn M. Berk, Florida International University
English Syntax: From Word to Discourse is a clear and highly
accessible descriptive grammar of English with a strong semantic and
discourse/functional focus. Designed for beginning graduate students
and advanced undergraduates in linguistics, it is also suitable for
use in TESOL/ESL programs and in English departments. The text
explains the basics of English syntax while providing students with a
comprehensive view of the richness and complexity of the system. Each
structure is discussed in terms of its syntactic features, its
meaning, and its uses in discourse, and each discussion is extensively
illustrated by examples from written texts of all kinds and by
excerpts of spoken language. While the presentation has been
influenced by a number of theories, the book presumes no theoretical
background on the part of the student and the approach is relatively
informal. Syntactic structures are graphically illustrated by means of
nesting boxes rather than tree diagrams. Historical information
illuminates some particularly problematic constructions, and the book
is punctuated with intriguing facts about English syntax. All
terminology is carefully explained and most terms are defined again in
the extensive glossary. Berk anticipates areas where students are
likely to have trouble, warns them of pitfalls, and shows them how to
avoid common mistakes. English Syntax: From Word to Discourse provides
a unique alternative to the formal, generative approach of other texts
in the field.
February 1999 336 pp.
0-19-512353-0 paper $24.95
0-19-512352-2 cloth $55.00
Oxford University Press
FRAGMENTS: Studies in Ellipsis and Gapping
Edited by Shalom Lappin, University of London, and Elabbas Benmamoun,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne
This volume contains essays on ellipsis -- the omission of understood
words from a sentence -- and the closely related phenomena of gapping.
This volume presents work by leading researchers on syntactic,
semantic and computational aspects of ellipsis. The chapters bring
together a variety of theoretical perspectives and examine a range of
cross-linguistic phenomena involving ellipsis in Japanese, Arabic,
Hebrew, and in English. This volume will be of interest to
syntacticians, semanticists, computational linguists, and cognitive
scientists.
January 1999 320 pp.
0-19-512302-6 $60.00
Oxford University Press
SYNTACTIC CHANGE IN WELSH: A Study of the Loss of Verb-Second
David W. E. Willis, Jesus College, University of Oxford
Scholars have often been puzzled by the fact that the basic word-order
rule of Welsh seems to have changed twice in the last 1000 years. David
Willis explores how and why these changes have taken place. He
examines the relationship between the literary and spoken language
throughout the history of Welsh, points out similarities between the rules
of earlier Welsh and other European languages, and looks at the forces
that cause languages to change over time.
January 1999 320 pp.; 25 figures
0-19-823759-6 $98.00
Oxford University Press
ADVERBS AND FUNCTIONAL HEADS: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Guglielmo Cinque, University of Venice, Italy
(Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)
One of the world's leading syntacticians presents evidence for locating
Adverb Phrases in the specifiers of distinct functional projections within
a novel and well articulated theory of the clause. In this theory, both
adverbs and heads, which encode the functional notions of the clause,
are ordered in a rigid sequence. Cinques cutting-edge proposal suggests
that the structure of natural language sentences is much richer than
previously assumed.
March 1999 288 pp.
0-19-511527-9 paper $45.00
0-19-511526-0 cloth $65.00
Oxford University Press
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